MEDICAL MATTERS

A Passion To Help Patients Leads A Pharmacy School Graduate To A Big Job At A Top Pharmaceutical Company

Those who suffer from migraines can take comfort in the fact that Dr. Nino Barayev, along with a global medical team, works daily to help ease their pain. At just 29, Dr. Barayev is a medical senior manager on the Global Medical Migraine Team at Pfizer.

Women are three times more likely to get migraines than men, says Dr. Barayev, who is one of them, though she says her migraines are mild compared to most. “Due to the lack of awareness of the debilitating impact, people who suffer with migraines are highly misunderstood, which adds stress in the workplace as well as in personal lives,” says Dr. Barayev, who was born in the Republic of Georgia and came to the U.S. at 17. “I applied for this team because migraine is the second most disabling neurological disorder in the world and yet there is a huge unmet need.”

On the Global Medical Migraine team, she leads patient-centered initiatives that help bring patient voices from across the globe into the fold. “Their voices and experiences are incorporated into every aspect of what we do. They provide vital information that helps us help them.” she says.

In addition to her full-time work, during the pandemic lockdown, Dr. Barayev published a phone app called Same Page, designed for those dealing with various emotions, including isolation and loneliness. “In a world of hashtags, likes and followers, Same Page makes it easier to find likeminded people and allows people to build genuine friendships,” she says. The app guides people to a page where they can join conversations with others with similar experiences: “On Same Page, people can make real connections, share their feelings, emotions, stories, major life events and be connected with those who understand and can relate.”

It was Touro College of Pharmacy that helped Dr. Barayev develop her entrepreneurial leanings and her passion for helping people who suffer from mental or physical pain. A 2020 graduate, she credits the school not simply for what she considers to have been an excellent education, but for exposing students to the myriad opportunities open to pharmacists. “I learned about so many different paths; there are internships, rotations, residencies and fellowships that help students find their paths. That’s how you learn what your professional passion is,” she says.

She wasn’t shy about seeking out opportunities to learn about the vast field of pharmacy through volunteering, internships and the fellowship she landed after graduating. From working as a pharmacy tech at Mount Sinai Beth Israel—“I was so inspired by what they did and how much they cared about getting treatments right for the patients!”—to her third year in pharmacy school, when she completed a rotation at Pfizer, then a Rutgers Pharmaceutical Fellowship and ultimately, a dream job at Pfizer. “I had an awakening,” recalls Dr. Barayev, who lives with her husband and dog, Gobi, in New York City. “I wanted to work with these people. I wanted to be one of them. I love what they do. And now I do it, too.”

Mining Their Own Minds

AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

PRINCIPAL SHOWS HER STUDENTS THAT CRITICAL THINKING IS REWARDING— AND FUN

Rakiya Adams watched in wonder as her college professor father prepared lectures and exams for his banking management students. “I was a little girl, and he made such an impression on me,” says Adams, who was born in New York City to parents who emigrated from Ghana. “He’d practice his lectures and work on his accent, and he’d let me staple his exam papers for the student tests. He was the first teacher I admired, but he certainly wasn’t the last.”

The admirer has become the admired. At 40, Adams is the principal of Bronxville Elementary School, in Westchester County, NY. She was promoted to her new post recently after serving three years as the school’s assistant principal. In her former school in New York City, Adams pushed STEM education for girls, bringing in the founder of Girls Who Code, female software engineers and other women who succeeded in technology. “They see that there are countless possibilities for girls in STEM,” she says. “If we want girls—and boys—to realize their potential, their uniqueness, we have to show them real, live adults who have found passion and success in their professional lives.”

Adams, wife and mother to two girls, completed Touro’s Graduate School of Education in 2011. She credits Touro’s program and its professors for where she finds herself today. “Touro literally provided me with a pathway to get the degree I needed, to do what I’ve always wanted to do,” says Adams, who has been an instructional math coach and STEM specialist as well as a classroom teacher. “It was the perfect setup. I could work full time and still get my master’s degree. I was aspiring to become a certified early education teacher, and that would never have happened without the excellent education and support I received.”

She is paying it forward. Adams didn’t create the school’s motto—The Bronxville Promise: Innovate. Lead. Think Critically. Engage the World—but she has breathed life into those tenets. She has received the support of the teachers and staff to team up to help the students discover themselves and others utilizing Project Based Learning (PBL). Students in each grade decide on a class topic. They talk about it, research it, make recommendations, offer solutions. The fifth graders’ PBL unit, titled Be The Change, for example, takes on real-world problems like homelessness, equity and inclusion for all, or the staggering incarceration rate for men and women of color, and came up with solutions to lower those numbers. The first graders’ topic was recess. “Recess is where so many social issues happen from negotiations, conflict resolution, friendship, how to treat others, playing fair,” Adams says, adding that the first graders put their rules for resolving problems on posters displayed on the playground. “All our students present their topics, research and findings to the entire community of parents and our school family. It’s a wonderful, fun way to teach critical thinking and problem-solving to kids. And it doesn’t hurt that we adults can learn from them, too.”